Introduction The Cultural and Historical Moment Perceptions That Framed African American
Womens Experiences in That Decade
Introduction The Cultural and Historical Moment perceptions that framed African
American womens experiences in that decade. The situation comedy, which was the most
popular in African American households when it aired from 1993-1998, showed a close- knit
group of single friends living in Brooklyn, New York and starred rapper turned actress Queen
Latifah (as Khadijah James), former child star Kim Fields (as Regine Hunter), comedian Kim
Coles (as Synclaire James) and former Cosby kid Erika Alexander (as Maxine Shaw). Each of
the primary female characters was a professional woman with a successful career: Khadijah
James was a magazine publisher, Maxine Shaw was a lawyer, Synclaire James was an
administrative assistant/aspiring actress and Regine Hunter was a buyer for a boutique as well as
an event planner.
More significantly, these lyrics allude to the elements that typified the African American
woman’s experience that included a focus on marital status (“living single”), using resilience to
overcome challenges (“Whenever this life get tough, you gotta fight”) and the importance of
authentic sisterhood (“With my homegirls standing to my left and my right True blue, it’s tight
,like glue”). Even though some labeled Living Single a “Black” version of similar women-
centered television shows Designing Women and Golden Girls, what distinguished the show was
how it effectively challenged popular misperceptions about African American women. Some of
these perceptions lingered from the damaging rhetoric and media representations of what
President Ronald Reagan derisively called “welfare queens” from the 1980s, chiefly that most
African American women were low income single mothers living on welfare or hypersexualized
like the video vixens featured in popular music videos.
The fact that the show featured four African American female characters navigating
personal and professional challenges with savvy wit as well as thought-provoking solutions was
unique. In fact, the show’s creator Yvette Bowser was intentional about positive depictions of
the contemporary African American woman on the show. In a June 2019 Madame Noire article,
Bowser recalls how challenging this was when she was asked to remove Maxine Shaw, the
character who eventually became one of its most popular, from the show because
she was unapologetically Black and female and fierce, and all of the things that, if I
wasn’t at that time, I wanted to be ultimately. And I knew that that would be a powerful
force in the world ’cause I know that our art is, you know, our art is our activism, and I
knew that that voice had been missing.
Despite the possibility of losing the show, Bowser refused to make the change. As a result,
through Shaw and the other characters, viewers saw dynamic and complex African American
female characters.
In The Root article, “Living Single Cast and Creator Reflect on Legacy 20 Years After
Series Finale,” Bowser shares how the show was created to fill a void left after the end of the
television show A Different World in the early 1990s. She states how it impacted her and that she
,was disturbed because “There was no longer a platform for strong black female voices.
Suddenly, I didn’t see myself.” The same article credits Living Single with having a long-term
impact that remains including having paved the way “for shows like Insecure, and still reigns as
a beloved fixture of black entertainment and pop culture.” Naturally, relationships were a
centerpiece of the show’s narrative and dramatic conflicts. However, the show also addressed
issues that had previously received little attention in television shows like African American
cultural identity in the workplace as well as depression among African American women. By the
time the show ended its run in January 1998, it was credited with illustrating that heading into
the new millennium there was a new African American woman who strived for authenticity,
transparency and emotional wholeness.
Coupled with the success of the television show Living Single were movies made about
African American women during the same time. Despite being on the opposite end of the
spectrum in terms of their characterization of contemporary life for African American women,
movies like Waiting to Exhale and Set It Off were lauded for equally compelling depictions of
life for African American women in the mid-1990s. Waiting to Exhale portrayed a close-knit
group of single professional African American female friends and was based on the best-selling
1995 novel of the same name by author Terri McMillian. On the other hand, Set It Off, released a
year later in 1996, provided a much grittier portrayal of working class African American women
striving to overcome their financial circumstances by creating a bank robbery ring. Though very
different, both movies were extremely successful with Waiting to Exhale grossing $81 million
worldwide and Set It Off grossing $41 million worldwide according to the Internet Movie
Database indicating that interest in the experiences of contemporary African American women
was not just limited to the domestic African American movie audience. Professor Tamika Carey
, refers to the excitement that these films created in her book Rhetorical Healing: The Reeducation
of Contemporary Black Womanhood and notes that “the market for films focusing on Black
women as subjects- not objects- moving from a state of dispowerment to empowerment or
navigating obstacles in their interpersonal relationships and careers, flourished in the mid-
nineties” (120). The women in these cultural productions were different from what audiences had
previously seen. According to Carey, in these films “Black women appear as dynamic
protagonists dealing with real-life dilemmas and exercising forms of agency forecasted in the
literature of Black women writers decades earlier” (120). These images also countered previous
narratives of an indomitable “strong black woman” as they showed the weaknesses and
complications of the sometimes fragile ethos of the contemporary African American woman.
Even though both movies were directed by men, F. Gary Gray and Forest Whitaker
respectively, they dealt with the same core issue of how shifting values of contemporary African
American woman impacted their personal and professional lives. As presented in these movies,
there was a complicated depiction of the contemporary African American woman’s ethos
featuring traits like resilience, strength, independence, relational interdependence, and
hopefulness. Relationships were more complicated as the women in both movies were shown as
struggling with emotional dysfunctions, low self-esteem and stinging disappointments.
At the same time, this empowered, full realized black woman appeared in African
American women’s Christian fiction too. Seemingly in response to the cultural moment that led
to the creation of these movies, contemporary African American Christian fiction authors crafted
depictions of the contemporary African American Christian woman that showed similar
struggles but framed within a Christian worldview. This desire to provide contemporary
Christian solutions to secular problems led to the development of contemporary African
